Escape the Room

We sat around the dinner table and did a good number of riddles while we were together on the boat.   Someone would pose the riddle and then  we would jump in with questions to try and figure out the answer.   If you figured out the answer you didn’t say it out loud, you’d just let the group know you’d got the answer and then sit back while the other people tried to figure out the catch.

Riddles were fun but we moved into a more complex version of these mental puzzles.   The children had heard of several of these “escape the room” type of puzzles.   Andrew and Julia had a couple of these and my son had some too.

They’re fun in that you have an initial setup such as, "you’re in a locked room that’s completely dark.  How do you get out?”  You can ask questions and make requests, such as, “feel around the walls and see if I find anything.”   You find out there is a door on one wall and a light switch on another wall.   So you ask to flip the light switch and see what happens.  In this case, the room lit up.   In another scenario, nothing happened.

Lots of times there’s a catch to figuring out how to get the key and get out of the room.   Other times there’s a series of steps to figure out, making it more of a puzzle to solve incrementally instead.

We exhausted the escape the room riddles fairly quickly but that didn’t stop my children.   They made up new ones on the fly.  My son is good at this, but my daughter is truly amazing.  And I mean that in the real sense of the word.   I’ve done a bunch of these with her since we first did them on the boat days ago.   Every time she comes up with something totally unexpected.   The kinds of ideas adults can’t make the leap to because we’re set in our ways of how the world works and we’ve lost the ability to imagine any possibility.

Her ideas are just that good.   They’re the kind if right turn from reality type of thing that you see in a movie or read about in a book and appreciate the person who came up with it because it makes the experience something more.   I may be overselling this a bit here, but I’m her mom and I was impressed for sure.

If you’re interested, my daughter will play this game with you, being the “Room Master”.   Which I suppose is sort of akin to the Dungeon Master in D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) from when I was young.   My daughter will start you off in a room.  She’ll put in some interesting twists, but all the information is there to find the key (or dynamite or other alternate exiting item) and get out of the room.

Only this is my daughter we’re talking about here, and she’s never done if you’re talking and interacting with her, which means you find yourself in another room.   This can go on for many rooms.   It’s pretty fun to play with her; I need to start writing some of her ideas down.

The Big Boy Update:  We’re in the car going to New Jersey now.   My son sometimes experiences motion sickness—especially when he’s doing screens.   Today, after ten days on a sailboat that never stopped rocking, he’s been on his iPad for hours and is completely asymptomatic.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is having difficulty being patient, grateful and polite.   I am hoping it’s age appropriate because my husband and I are trying to raise polite, well- behaved children and right now I fell like we’re failing with both children.   Today in the car my daughter had to wait while everyone else had snack around her because she was rude to her father, demanding food immediately, while he was getting the car back onto the highway.   It started as ten minutes but she persisted in being defiant as well as insulting to both of us.   When she got three penalties in a row (she was hungry so making holding back food was a high value consequence art the time) she finally relented and turned back into the nice version of herself.